"Let’s... not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about."

Writes Donald Trump, at the end of this long post at Truth Social:

What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again.

"Ex-CIA chief John Brennan may have opened himself up to perjury charges over Trump-Russia hoax."

Writes Miranda Devine, in The New York Post.

[I]n congressional testimony under oath on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed the Steele dossier “wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done.”

Now we know that is not true. The Steele dossier was forced into the ICA by Brennan and it appeared not just in the “annex” but was referenced in the main body of the ICA that ended up triggering the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller that crippled the first two years of Trump’s first term and served to delegitimize his 2016 election victory.

And does this review of a review need a review?

I'm reading "Obama’s Trump-Russia collusion report was corrupt from start: CIA review" (NY Post): "A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were 'excessively involved' in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a 'chaotic,' 'atypical' and 'markedly unconventional' process that raised questions of a 'potential political motive.' Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, 'undermined the credibility' of the assessment."

"If it is felony 'election interference' for a candidate to try to keep private the details of a seamy relationship, what other candidate concealments — of a lawful and entirely personal nature — must be reported?"

"Must the out-of-pocket settlement for that fender-bender be disclosed, since it conceals a candidate's bad driving skills? How about plastic surgery, since it masks the true ravages of age or health?... The Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 paid an opposition-research firm to produce a bogus dossier that accused Mr. Trump of collusion with Russia. They fed it to the FBI and leaked it to the public prior to the 2016 election. The DNC and Mrs. Clinton's campaign reported the expenditures to the Federal Election Commission but concealed their true nature by describing the payments as 'legal' services, as Mr. Trump did with his NDA. The FEC fined them for the deception, but under Mr. Bragg's theory it should count as criminal election interference."

Writes Kimberley A. Strassel, in "Alvin Bragg and Democrats' 'Election Interference'/His theory in New York state’s Trump case is crazier than you think" (Wall Street Journal).

"In his final days in the White House, Donald Trump told top advisers he needed to preserve certain Russia-related documents to keep his enemies from destroying them."

"The documents related to the federal investigation into Russian election meddling and alleged collusion with Trump’s campaign. At the end of his presidency, Trump and his team pushed to declassify these so-called 'Russiagate' documents, believing they would expose a 'Deep State' plot against him.... It’s unclear if any of the materials in Trump’s document trove are related to Russia or the election interference investigation.... 'I think they thought it was something to do with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,' Trump said during a Sept. 1 radio interview. 'They were afraid that things were in there — part of their scam material.'"

Rolling Stone reports.

"The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit... was... 'If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.'"

Says Bret Stephens — in "I Was Wrong About Trump Voters" (NYT) — about the first thing he ever wrote about Trump. That was in August 2015, and he went on to write "dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself."

He now regrets attacking the Trump voters. Because it wasn't effective?

Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.What were they seeing that I wasn’t?... What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo. I was blind to this....

He was part of that "self-satisfied elite." Does he genuinely take responsibility for his failure to see from the viewpoint of the non-elite? Or is this a repositioning in the hope of regaining power over the deplorables?

"Wall Street Journal investigative report this week underlines just how frivolous were the claims in the Steele dossier, and how nonexistent was the attempt..."

"... by Christopher Steele, the vaunted British ex-spy, to verify or even vet them. The sources for many of the Steele allegations consisted of three people 'brought together over a minor corporate-publicity contract,' not one of whom had any inside knowledge of Kremlin politics or the Trump campaign.... To be emphasized with extreme prejudice is Mr. Steele's studious incuriosity about the sourcing of the garbage he passed on to the Clinton campaign, with the only interesting question being how cognizant was the Clinton campaign or did it also not care.... Whatever the Kremlin's own six-figure investment in Facebook and Twitter memes or even its trafficking in stolen Democratic emails, nothing in Vladimir Putin's bag of tricks inflicted one-millionth the damage on American life that the Steele fabrications did.... Mr. Trump may be a compendium of human vices but he will always be the president who withstood the most insidious, organized slur in modern memory. His enemies did that for him, not least among them a largely cretinous media that showed its true colors, which turned out to have nothing to do with fearless and searching concern for the truth...."

Writes Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in "What Did the Steele Dossier Hoax Cost America? Along with the press, what about the Russia ‘experts’ who played along or failed to oppose the collusion lie?" (Wall Street Journal).

Annoyingly, the WSJ has the wrong link for the investigative report. It goes to a column Jenkins wrote in 2017, something he refers to elsewhere in this new column. But it should go to the May 9th article, "Three Friends Chatting: How the Steele Dossier Was Created/Report that rattled the political world often echoed talk among three acquaintances, including the main investigator and an old schoolmate."

"Several large shareholders have urged BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down the entire news operation...."

"BuzzFeed News... has about 100 employees and loses roughly $10 million a year.... The digital media company went public via a special purpose acquisition vehicle in December. The shares immediately fell nearly 40% in their first week of trading and haven’t recovered.... Rather than shut down BuzzFeed News, Peretti is attempting to make the division profitable. He has a ready-made template: He made the decision to lay off 70 HuffPost staffers last year after acquiring the company from Verizon Media...."

CNBC reports.

BuzzFeed — I haven't blogged about Buzzfeed since Ben Smith ran the place and Jake Tapper criticized him for being "‘Irresponsible’ For Publishing Trump Dossier." That was bloggable because Tapper wrote (in private email) "Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick."

"Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation."

 The NYT reports.

Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in....F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.... 

Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign. 

"The case against [Michael] Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016."

"Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign — which he denies.... A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has the authority to overrule Mr. Durham but is said to have declined to, did not comment.... The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time... Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.... Mr. Baker, the former F.B.I. lawyer, is said to have told investigators that he recalled Mr. Sussmann saying that he was not meeting him on behalf of any client. But in a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he sought the meeting on behalf of an unnamed client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data. Moreover, internal billing records Mr. Durham is said to have obtained from Perkins Coie are said to show that when Mr. Sussmann logged certain hours as working on the Alfa Bank matter — though not the meeting with Mr. Baker — he billed the time to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign."

From "Durham Is Said to Seek Indictment of Lawyer at Firm With Democratic Ties/The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a 2016 meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing" (NYT).

UPDATE: Sussmann indicted.

"By appointing Durham as a Special Counsel, Barr contradicted news reports before the election that Durham was frustrated and found nothing of significance...."

"Under the Justice Department regulations, Barr had to find (and Durham apparently agreed) that there is need for additional criminal investigation and '[t]hat investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney's Office or litigating Division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances.' He must also find the appointment in the public interest.... Presumably, the conflict is not in the current administration since it would have required an earlier appointment. The conflict would seem to be found in the upcoming Biden administration...The list of the names of people falling within that mandate is a who’s who of Washington from Hillary Clinton to James Comey to . . . yes . . . Joe Biden.... From a political perspective, the move is so elegantly lethal that it would make Machiavelli green with envy.... Durham['s] replacement or the termination of his investigation would be viewed as an obstructive act. Indeed, when Trump even suggested such a course of action, he was accused of obstruction by a host of Democratic politicians and legal experts.... Moreover, with the Mueller report, virtually every Democratic leader demanded that the report be released with no or few redactions. The Trump administration waived most executive privileges and released most of the report.... The Durham appointment will now force Democrats to answer why they do not support the same public release of the report so that voters can 'draw our own conclusions.'"

Writes Jonathan Turley in "Making John Durham a special counsel will cause problems for Biden/Now Democrats' Trump administration arguments will come back to haunt them" (USA Today).

"Carter Page sued fired FBI Director James Comey, fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, the FBI, and others involved in the improper Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act snooping..."

"... on the former Trump campaign associate that relied upon British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier to obtain approval from the FISA court."

The Washington Examiner reports.

"[Igor] Danchenko’s identity is noteworthy because it further calls into question the credibility of the [Steele] dossier."

"By turning to Mr. Danchenko as his primary source to gather possible dirt on Mr. Trump involving Russia, Mr. Steele was relying not on someone with a history of working with Russian intelligence operatives or bringing to light their covert activities but instead a researcher focused on analyzing business and political risks in Russia.... Born in Ukraine, Mr. Danchenko, 42, [a resident of the United States] is a Russian-trained lawyer who earned degrees at the University of Louisville and Georgetown University.... He was a senior research analyst from 2005 to 2010 at the Brookings Institution....

"The FBI was warned sections of the controversial Steele dossier could have been part of a 'Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations'..."

"... according to newly declassified footnotes from a government watchdog report. The December report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz examined the FBI's investigation into alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia as well as the FBI's four surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.... Several footnotes in Horowitz's report were redacted, and Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson pushed for the declassification of four footnotes related to the Steele dossier... Footnote 350 in the IG report addresses the FBI's knowledge of Russian contacts with Steele and the potential for disinformation. Steele had 'frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from (redacted) indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele's election reporting.'..."

Writes Catherine Herridge at CBS News.

"The Steele dossier was central to obtaining the Page warrant, and the leaks about the dossier fanned two years of media theories about Russian collusion..."

"... that was one reason Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel. Mr. Mueller owed the public an explanation of how much of the dossier could be confirmed or repudiated. Instead he abdicated, and the mystery is why. Perhaps as a former FBI director, Mr. Mueller wanted to protect the bureau's reputation... A less generous explanation is that Mr. Mueller was more a figurehead as special counsel, and that the investigation was really run by his deputy Andrew Weissmann.... On the evidence in the Horowitz report, the special counsel team had to know the truth about the Steele dossier and false FBI claims to the FISA court, but they chose to look the other way."

From "Robert Mueller's Dossier Dodge," an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

And also in the Wall Street Journal from "FISA Court Owes Some Answers" by Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:

Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer... blasted the FBI for misleading the court ...  The order depicts a court stunned to discover that the FBI failed in its "duty of candor," and angry it was duped. That's disingenuous. To buy it, you'd have to believe that not one of the court's 11 members -- all federal judges -- caught a whiff of this controversy until now. More importantly, you'd have to ignore that the court was directly informed of the FBI's abuses nearly two years ago....

[The court is] predictably pointing fingers at the FBI, but the court should itself account for its failure to provide more scrutiny, and its refusal to act when [Congressman Devin] Nunes first exposed the problem [in February 2018, when he was chair of the House Intelligence Committee]. The FBI is far from alone in this disgrace.

"The left keens that the president is destroying our sacred institutions and jeopardizing our national security. But..."

"... for many Americans, the events of the last week prove that Trump is right to be cynical about a rigged system and deep-state elites. The inspector general’s report about the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation offered a hideous Dorian Gray portrait of the once-vaunted law enforcement agency. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times, the report uncovered “a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process.” The F.B.I. run by Comey and McCabe was sloppy, deceitful and cherry-picking — relying on nonsense spread by Christopher Steele.... Unfortunately, this climate of confusion and cynicism allows Trump to prosper. He did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it."

From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Trump’s Bad. Sadly, He’s Not Alone/Another wild week for the president, but does it lead to rejection or re-election?" (NYT).

Is it true that Trump "did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system"? He was always saying "drain the swamp." You might argue that he's no good at cleaning things up or that he's messing things up in his own way, but I don't see the support for the notion that his intention in becoming President was "to bathe in" the swamp. Didn't he visualize himself as a hero who had observed things for decades and felt confident that he could apply his insight and business acumen to fixing everything?

"Simpson and Fritsch acknowledge that several of Steele’s most sensational allegations remain unproven and that others were almost surely wrong... [but] 'a spy whose sources get it 70 percent right is considered to be one of the best'..."

"and... while reporters focussed on the most salacious details, they 'tended to miss the central message,' about which they say Steele was largely correct. They note that, in his first report, in June, 2016, Steele warned that Russian election meddling was 'endorsed by Putin' and 'supported and directed' by him to 'sow discord and disunity with the United States itself but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance'—six months before the U.S. intelligence community collectively embraced the same conclusion. Steele also was right, they argue, that 'Putin wasn’t merely seeking to create a crisis of confidence in democratic elections. He was actively pulling strings to destroy Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump,' an assessment the U.S. intelligence community also came to accept. And they note that, as of September, 2019, U.S. officials confirmed that the C.I.A. had 'a human source inside the Russian government during the campaign, who provided information that dovetailed with Steele’s reporting about Russia’s objective of electing Trump and Putin’s direct involvement in the operation.'"

From "The Inside Story of Christopher Steele’s Trump Dossier/In a new book, the founders of the firm that compiled it defend their work" by Jane Mayer (in The New Yorker).

About those "sensational allegations":

"So we released the transcript of the call, which was so good that that crooked Adam Schiff, this guy is crooked, he had to make up a fake conversation that never happened... and he delivered it to the United States Congress and the American people."

"It was a total fraud. And then Nancy Pelosi said, 'Oh, I think the president said that.' These people are sick. I’m telling you, they’re sick. And you know what? Had they waited one day longer, they would have had the transcript of the actual call, word for word. It would’ve been perfect. Instead, they released it, they went early, they said all these horrible things. You know why? Because they never thought in a million years that I was going to release a transcript of the call."

Said Donald Trump at his Minneapolis rally last night, just a few minutes after he made up a fake conversation:

Months earlier, Peter Strzok, remember, he and his lover, Lisa Page. What a group. “She’s going to win 10 million to one. She’s going to win. I’m telling you, Peter. I’m telling you, Peter, she’s going to win. Peter. Oh, I love you so much. I love you, Peter.”

“I love you too, Lisa. Lisa, I love you. Lisa, Lisa, oh God, I love you, Lisa. And if she doesn’t win, Lisa, we’ve got an insurance policy, Lisa. We’ll get that son of a bitch out. We got an insurance policy.”

And we’re living through the insurance policy. That’s what it is. The phony Russia hoax. "Lisa, I love you.”

I've already written — approvingly — of Trump's "I love you, Lisa" routine, but I want to ask when is it okay to make up quotes and put them in the mouths of real people? Obviously, it's comedy, but it's comedy that's based on something that happened in real life, something that we may not remember exactly, and the comic exaggeration may distort memories of what really happened.

Here's my post from last week about Schiff's satirical paraphrase of Trump's phone call to the Ukrainian President. Schiff — you may remember — said:

"I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good, I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand, lots of it, on this and on that...."

The real-life statement by Trump was:

"The other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me."

Nothing about asking that "dirt" be "made up." And there's a firm grounding in specific facts that were well-supported by Joe Biden's own public bragging. The more I go back to Trump's original statement, the more it seems like something a President ought to do. If you look only at Schiff's comic restatement, you can't see any of the basis for thinking what Trump did was acceptable! It sounds more like Trump wanted the President of Ukraine to put together something like the Steele dossier.

If Trump wants to take Schiff and Pelosi to task for their self-serving paraphrase of him, shouldn't he be careful about creating a dialogue like his highly amusing Page-and-Strzok shtick?

One answer is that Schiff was speaking in Congress, in his role as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, while Trump was speaking a political campaign rally. But if you think the line should be drawn there, what motivated you — neutral principles of line-drawing or a desire to find Trump right and Schiff wrong?

And, as you know, hot dog is Mitt Romney's favorite meat.

My favorite meat is hot dog 🌭 Happy #NationalHotDogDay! pic.twitter.com/xrForVbLOF

— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) July 18, 2019

Meat 'n' Mitt — America's favorite combo.

Actually... if I were Mitt, I'd worry about prodding people with "dog"... If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's an entire Wikipedia article, "Mitt Romney dog incident." From that article:

Responding to Democrats who emphasized the Seamus story, conservative bloggers such as Jim Treacher drew a comparison between the Seamus incident and Barack Obama sampling dog meat as a child in Indonesia, where it is a local delicacy, as mentioned in Obama's autobiography. While an Obama spokesman called it an attack on a small child, Obama himself has displayed a sense of humor about it.

The White House Correspondents' Dinner saw Obama saying that Sarah Palin's stint guest hosting The Today Show reminded him of an old query: "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious." Delaney, Arthur; Stuart, Hunter (April 30, 2012). "Obama Ate Dog, And He'd Do It Again To Remind You Of Seamus Romney". Huffington Post (Video).

Ah, I got to use my old "Obamedy" tag again. And it's interesting to see Sarah Palin again. She's been off the radar screen for quite a while. Do we ever hear of her these days? Well, there's this outré acknowledgment from Sacha Baron Cohen, who just got an Emmy nomination for that barely watchable show he put out:

"While I am flattered at these nods, it is a shame that my co-stars were not recognized," Cohen wrote on Twitter. "Particularly Dick Cheney, who I had hoped would come across on camera as someone who’d gleefully sent hundreds of thousands to their pointless death — and boy did he deliver." He added, "There’s one more person I need to thank even though she didn’t appear in the final project, Sarah Palin. Sarah, if you are out there, and you are WAY out there, please know the last time unseen footage generated as much interest, was when Donald Trump visited a Moscow hotel room."

Well, this post went down the rat hole. Here we are in the Steele dossier!

Did Trump say that Obama was behind a group of people who were trying to steal the election using the fake dossier?

From the unedited transcripts of Trump's interview with George Stephanopoulos (which aired in edited form on ABC last night). I'll boldface the crucial language:

TRUMP: [T]hey could not get the fake dossier printed prior to the election... But had that been printed before the election, that could have changed the whole election. And that's what they wanted to do: steal. And Comey and all these lowlives, they wanted to have that fake dossier, which was all phony stuff. They wanted it to go out before the election, George. And you know what? Had that gone out before the election, I-- I don't think I could've-- I don't think I would've had enough time to defend myself--

STEPHANOPOULOS: You clearly believe there was-- a group of people working against you. Do you think President Obama was behind it?

TRUMP: I would say that he certainly must have known about it because it went very high up in the chain. But you're going to find that out. I'm not going to make-- that statement quite yet. But I would say that President Obama had to know about it....

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you believe that President Obama spied on your campaign--

TRUMP: I don't know. But hopefully we're going to find out.

He ends with that "I don't know," but I think he revealed that he did know. Why would he say "I'm not going to make that statement quite yet" if he didn't already have a plan to make the statement in the future? To say "you're going to find that out" suggests that he has already found out.

Notice that Stephanopoulos asks his question 2 ways and gets different answers. When asked whether Obama was "behind" what was "a group of people working against" him, Trump says he's not ready to talk about that "quite yet," while indicating, I believe, that he himself already know. The follow up question has Obama directly involved in a specific activity — Did Obama spy? As to that, Trump says he doesn't know but hopes to find out.